As web sites become more ubiquitous, businesses are increasingly interested in setting performance goals and quality standards for their web sites. One way to achieve these objectives is to simulate a user's experience with a company web site. By simulating a user's experience, the owner of a web site can determine the integrity of links and resources in the page and rate a customer's experience against the operational goals defined by the business. Furthermore, the information technology departments of companies will be better able to track and measure critical web resources.
One way to simulate a user's path through a web site is to record all the requests made by a user at a proxy server, record additional data related to each request and open a socket to send back the exact data that was passed. This technique can be used for web sites that contain only static pages. However, an increasing number of web sites are dynamic, and a method for replaying a user's path through the web must be able to account for content such as session IDs and forms. Because dynamic content can cause a web page session to expire or change over time, simply replaying a series of requests will often result in errors being returned from the target web site.
Current methods for simulating a path through web sites do not adequately address dynamic web sites. Microsoft Web Stress Analyzer Tool was developed to stress test a web site prior to making the site available on the Internet. The Microsoft tool only supports cookie-based dynamic web site techniques but does not support other techniques, nor does it support HTTPS communication between a browser and a web site. Furthermore, the Microsoft tool requires that software be downloaded and installed on a user's computer.